THE CACAO BEAN. 71 



being 44,828 tons. Messrs. Cadbury and Fry now have 

 cacao plantations of their own in Ashanti. 



The birth and growth of the cacao industry in the 

 Gold Coast reads like romance. Totteh Quarshie, of 

 Christianburg, towards the end of the nineteenth century, 

 brought a few beans from Fernando Po, where he had 

 been working as a blacksmith. Planting them, and 

 nursing the seeds, his little enterprise soon became 

 profitable. Others soon imitated him. In 1891 the first 

 shipment of about 80 Ibs., valued at 4, was made to 

 this country, since when it has leaped rapidly to about 

 80,000 tons, valued at about four millions sterling 

 more than a-third of the total cacao production of the 

 world. Every pound has been grown by native farmers, 

 and the family incomes of cacao-growers have been 

 multiplied a hundredfold or more, many amounting to 

 between one and two thousand pounds sterling yearly, 

 a few being even larger. Cacao is now also being grown 

 in Togoland, Cameroons, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. 



In Nigeria, the export of cacao has increased from 

 99,000 cwts., valued at 172,000, in 1914, to over 200,000 

 cwts., valued at about 400,000. Ibadan is the largest 

 producing centre, and three native cacao instructors 

 are employed in the Calabar and Abeokuta provinces 

 and in the Agege district. In the first-named, cacao- 

 planting competitions are encouraged by the Govern- 

 ment. In the last-named, tests made with the Hamel 

 Smith drying machine, to compare the effects of sun- 

 drying and machine-drying, showed the percentage of 

 alkaloids in the artificially-dried product to be 2-05 as 

 compared with 1-92 in the sun-dried, but the cost was 

 three times as great. 



